My name is Rania Ghosn, I'm co-founder of the practice Design Earth with El Hadi Jazairy, and we're looking at After Oil. The project was designed as a series of three triptychs. So it was three moments in the system of oil and the energy system has points of extraction for fossil fuels, points of transit, and moments of excess or environmental disasters and oil spills as we call them. So the after oil project is a series of speculative drawing that thinks of these past, present, and future geographies of oil and the Persian Gulf through these three moments. The first project Das Island Das Crude, looks at the site of extraction which is Das Island. Das Island is a major Emirati offshore oil and gas industrial facility that was first the domain of exploration in the 1950s and has since fueled the urbanization of Abu Dhabi and its sister emirate Dubai. We live in cities, we consume energy, we ride cars, use electricity, public transport but we rarely imagine the sites of production from which such energy sources are brought from. So what Das Island does is it reconciles two worldviews, it brings urbanism and the environment together by inviting us to imagine the earth and its depth as a section. So the section in Das Oil superimposes the geologic depth of Das Island into a series of iconic tower landmarks that are some of the most recognized forms of architectural constructions in Dubai. The section itself is both a geologic section and it is also a timeline. So the deeper you dig, the higher the landmarks become. The second project is the Strait of Hormuz Grand Chessboard. The Strait of Hormuz is a critical oil transit choke point with around 20 percent of world oil trade moving through this 34 mile wide passage. So the Grand Chessboard repurposes the Strait into a real estate territorial game. Imagine it somewhere between a monopoly and risk. When you look at it in section, you also start to see the forms of life other than human life that crossed that Strait and begin to co-exist with the movement and operations of tankers. One should keep in mind that structural violence of oil which unfold over the longer term, and are particularly obvious and visible in water bodies such as the Persian Gulf that are very shallow and witnessing significant changes in acidity and forms of life. Bubiyan Island or There Once Was an Island is the third project in the After Oil series. The project reflects on the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991 that was also a moment of the world's largest oil spill, one that drastically altered the environment of the Persian Gulf and the business as usual of the oil industry. This island will be significantly threatened by rising sea levels. So what the project does is it proposes a series of vertical elements that are used to stabilize the ground and that are inserted in the 16 highest points in the island and become small sanctuaries for the different forms of life that inhabit that island. So it's an archipelago, maybe not for human life, but other forms of life, antelopes, sea turtles, that have inhabited that island for a longer time. So the drawing is at the same time a documentary, it's critical of current relations, it's speculative, and it's first and foremost, a tool of communication that seeks to invite the viewer to begin to care. We will always imagine that there is possibly a faraway, distant remote, uninhabited place that can still bear the costs of urbanization, while the city can only reap the most beautiful rewards, and it's precisely that that After Oil wants to counteract, it wants us to imagine a continuity to explore the geographic imagination, as always connecting spaces of production and spaces of consumption. It does not pretend to know better about a time that has not yet come, but it wants us to reflect critically on the time and space that we occupy now.
